React Finland 2018 Tour Diary

Last month, the inaugural React Finland Conference was held on April 24–26 in Helsinki, Finland’s capital. It was the first ever React conference in Finland, and I was lucky enough to present a workshop there on component-driven development. Having React as a framework of choice at Wayfair, this was a great opportunity to share my knowledge as well as pick up some useful learnings from other members of the React community.

The conference itself

The organizers of React Finland put on a spectacular conference, especially as it was the first ever event. There was plenty of time between talks to relax, process the information you were receiving, and chat with your friends and new connections. The conference was single-track — my favorite kind, hosted at a great, central location in the city. There were plenty of good coffee places around, too — a benefit of the longer breaks React Finland provided for attendees.

So far, so good. But what did I learn during my time there? We’re going to make this quick and easy – think of this recap as a collection of lightning highlights.

Patrick showed us how React Context can be useful in some cases, such as showing third-party ads in your app. The new API looks easier to use than the old one, and is more explicit. This was a great lightning talk to get attendees up to speed, with slides to match.

Did you know that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load? According to Sia, Next.js simplifies server-side rendering, code splitting, and prefetching future routes with React:

Using Apollo to manage state seems like a good idea if you’re already using Apollo to fetch data from your server. Sara’s presentation showed us how to use apollo-boost to bootstrap Apollo with apollo-link-state (for local state) and much more.

The API seems verbose, but Redux is verbose too; having a single API to manage state (both server and client) is better than having two. I’m inclined to agree! More from Sara’s talk can be seen here.

A linter is a tool that finds silly bugs, but it’s easy to forget to run your linter when you commit. Then, suddenly, ten minutes later, you see that your CI is failing. Andrey showed the crowd how to:

Use lint-staged to run linters as a precommit hook and husky to manage Git hooks.

How #React changed everything (for better) talk by @ken_wheeler at #ReactFinland started the 2nd day. Nice reality check to history of web tech and why React is great. Also shortly what comes next. But remember “Web is not suited for application development”. pic.twitter.com/7o0MfXOVp8

We heard from Nik about Reason and how to leverage features like variant types and pattern matching to make impossible states impossible. He also showed off how great a type inference it is, on top of it being a super fast compiler. Did you know…?

You can make wrong states impossible with variants.

It’s a good interop with JavaScript.

Variants as React props: Type safety.

But beware, Nik cautions us against rewriting everything to Reason – try one component first. His slides contain further insights here.

The most neglected variable is time – wise words from David Khourshid. With a finite number of events and states, he shared some incredibly useful advice throughout his presentation on Reactive State Machines:

Don’t allow a user to interact with the UI for two seconds before the transition to a new state.

How to use React, Webpack and other buzzwords if there is no need by Varya Stepanova

I’ve also spent a lot of time writing and rewriting my blog, instead of writing blog posts, and even ended up with my own static site generator. Varya was succinct throughout her slides and reminded me how the above-mentioned process was a good way to learn and try new things.

Conclusion

You’ve done it! You reached the end of my lightning recap. There will definitely be another iteration of React Finland next year, and likely closer to Summer. This will surely entice those who aren’t accustomed to snow and colder temperatures.

This conference presented a great opportunity to learn more about React and meet the growing Finnish React community. I’ll be applying the wealth of learnings I gained in my work on Wayfair’s frontend framework going forward.

Want to see even more from React Finland? The slides from all talks are available as open source here, while other helpful articles from different conference participants can be read here. Finally, see all the fun that was had via the shared Google Photos album! Try and spot your favorite speaker.